THE BFG
Director Steven Spielberg
Cert. PG, 117 mins
A lonely little orphan girl is having a sleepless night when out of the window of the orphanage she sees a giant. And he sees her seeing him. And, having done so, he feels obliged, in the interest of self-preservation to kidnap her and carry her off to his home in giant country.
So begins the adventure of Sophie (played by Ruby Barnhill) and the Big Friendly Giant – one of Roald Dahl’s many and well-loved tales, now beautifully made into a Steven Spielberg film with a digitally remas-tered Mark Rylance in the title role.
What kind of a giant is he? Does he eat children? And what about the other giants? And where do the bottled dreams that he keeps in his house come from? These questions are answered as the story unfolds. Both Sophie and the giant learn to understand each other’s worlds.
Stunning and magical
Visually stunning and totally magical, this film is also enhanced by some excellent dialogue liberally splattered with the BFG’s characteristic and enchanting malapropisms. Mark Rylance’s performance is superb and he makes the character as endearing as Dahl intended him to be. The sequence in Buckingham Palace with the Queen (played by Penelope Wilton) is highly entertaining, as the giant is highly entertained by the royal household!
This is a fairy story in the classic mould, with a moral framework and a very satisfactory ending. Child psychologists have long recognised the way in which the archetypal fairy tale meets the needs of a growing child facing up to a world which is at times hostile and dangerous: innocence threatened by evil powers, but then rescued and returned to safety while evil doers meet their justly nasty end. In this respect the BFG does not disappoint.
The worst nightmare
And, as the BFG introduces Sophie to the different dreams he collects and imparts to sleeping humans, we have this profound statement: the worst dream is the one where you face up to yourself and what you have done and there is no forgiveness. How true. Cue: the gospel.
